All of the Pleasure. None of the Guilt.

A friend of mine made a resolution once: No more guilty pleasures. I assumed at first that he meant he would no longer indulge in, you know, the usual cultural indulgences: those movies, books, TV shows, albums, et cetera, that are unabashedly enjoyable (like Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”) but that also confer a patina of guilt to the self-conscious cultural consumer even as he’s enjoying them (like Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”).

But I was wrong. My friend didn’t mean that at all. What he meant was simpler and, I have since realized, more radical and ultimately more inspiring. He’d still enjoy all those cultural indulgences, he said. He would just no longer classify them as indulgences. In other words, no more guilty pleasures for him meant: All of the pleasure. None of the guilt.

With the exceptions of warmongering doublespeak and racial epithets, is there any more pernicious linguistic remnant of the 20th century than the phrase “guilty pleasure”? And how did these two concepts ever come to be married anyway? Aside from the obvious (sex), there are only three other arenas in life in which guilt and pleasure are habitually linked: gastronomy, religion and the arts. And while there are semi-plausible rationalizations for the first two (that cake was delicious, but I ate too much; I indulged in an act I’ve been taught to feel is wrong), for the life of me I’ve never been able to unravel how cultural guilt and cultural pleasure became so entwined. I read this book. I liked it. Now I feel bad. How exactly did we inherit that emotional sequencing?

Yet there are still cultural critics who see guilt and pleasure as inherently connected, even necessarily interdependent, sort of like supply and demand. Then again, most of these critics would probably argue that by now the question is moot. We’re a decadent culture addicted to pleasure and not given enough to guilt, they’d say. As Jennifer Szalai wrote in a recent New Yorker essay, “Against ‘Guilty Pleasure,’ ” about the rise of the concept in the 1990s: “The guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter.”

Szalai’s essay makes several excellent points — not least in calling out “guilty pleasure” as a self-serving term that offers the user “a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation” — and in the end, she exhorts the reader, much like my resolution-making friend, to simply enjoy what you enjoy, guilt be damned. But I think her denunciation of the concept doesn’t go nearly far enough. Rather than simply admitting without guilt that we enjoy something that’s, well, enjoyable, why not be done with the whole idea that certain cultural pleasures are more edifying than others? Why not retire the familiar labels that are simply remnants of a cultural caste system? Culture is one of the last arenas of experience that can offer us unmitigated pleasure — the joy of an enveloping read; the rapture of a thrilling film. Why taint that enjoyment with apprehension about the worthiness of the enjoyment itself?

So I’d advocate for an even bigger imaginative leap: one that acknowledges the wide spectrum of pleasures that books (and TV, movies, music, theater, what have you) can offer us and then — and here’s the radical part — doesn’t immediately insist that these pleasures must also be sorted into a moral hierarchy. (This pleasure: good; that pleasure: bad; this one: in the middle.) Can we instead envision a world in which the person struggling through (but enjoying!) “Remembrance of Things Past” and the person tearing through (and enjoying!) “Gone Girl” can coexist on the same strip of sand, beach chairs side by side, each feeling pleasure in her solitary rapt world and neither one needing to cloak that pleasure behind the brown-paper wrapper of guilt?

I’m not a libertarian, politically speaking — I’m Canadian, which puts me slightly to the left of Communist. But increasingly I find myself attracted to a notion I’ll call cultural libertarianism, which might be best summed up in that old saying “Whatever floats your boat.” Which is to say, I’m less and less inclined to drop the hammer on someone who’s sitting in the corner, contentedly reading Dan Brown. Does this mean I’m obliged to acknowledge and celebrate the artistry of Dan Brown? Of course not. For me, personally, Dan Brown doesn’t do it; he leaves my boat unfloated. If you’re interested, I’m happy to share my reasons. But I’m not going to suggest that your enjoyment of Dan Brown is somehow degraded or embarrassing or shameful. I’ve not only lost my fervor to wage a holy crusade against people who enjoy Dan Brown; I’ve lost my faith in the kind of critical crusaders who do.

Believe me, I’m tempted to stop here and delete this all, since this line of thinking seems to lead to arguing for a kind of critical anarchy — a cultural state in which all opinions are held to be equally valid and critical conversation itself is dismissed as so much distracting noise. Even worse, I’ll be forced to side with the familiar anticritical rhetoric that market-dominators like Michael Bay and Jay Leno so often embrace: If something is this popular, isn’t it then, by definition, good? And I really, honestly, truly don’t want to end up there. Save for a few carpetbagging stints over the years, I’ve never officially served as a critic of anything, but I love great critics and great criticism, and there’s so much of both in the Internet-enabled world right now. Moreover, I’ve shamelessly spent my whole journalistic career wading into the hurly-burly of cultural analysis with sleeves rolled, so I can’t exactly step back and renounce the whole scrum now.

But I have also spent long enough in the cultural-analysis game to recognize that condemning certain aspects of the culture as unworthy or spiritually harmful or, even worse, somehow morally detrimental is a popular critical pastime with a terrible batting average: basically .000, if you want to run the numbers. Jazz, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, comic books, sitcoms, slasher films, pulp novels, you name it — all have at one time or another been dismissed as somehow less than noble, their consumption salted with guilt from on high, yet somehow all survived and even thrived. Many have ascended to cultural respectability. The pulp masters of the early 20th century are now welcomed into the American canon. Jazz has been alternately labeled low-, then middle-, then highbrow, and hasn’t much cared, and only after being officially embraced as Art with a capital “A” does it now teeter on the edge of that last fatal abyss: cultural obsolescence. (Opera awaits in the pit below, arms open.) The same is true of television. The same is true of the novel. All were once considered degenerate. All have since been celebrated. And all of it regardless of — perhaps in spite of — collective critical apprehension to acknowledge their worthiness.

In fact, looking back over the 20th century, I can’t think of a single example of an artistic category that was dismissed as degraded that did not, at some point, rise to critical respect. (The soap opera?) What stands out, instead, are the people who persistently point and say, “That’s not art,” and who are persistently wrong.

As a kid, I remember my parents’ willingness to let me pursue my own cultural tastes, no matter how seemingly tasteless they were. My introduction to comic books, for example, that famously no-good-for-you medium, came in the crassest way imaginable: I got a toy called a Micronaut for Christmas one year, and it came bundled with a tie-in comic book. The toy soon broke, but the love of comics lasted. Frankly, I didn’t know any better than to love them.

My mother didn’t much approve of this — she’d rather I’d been reading C. S. Lewis — but I got to keep the comic book anyway, and many more, until soon I was waiting breathlessly for the Saturday each month when the smokeshop got the latest shipment of X-Men. As for my father, he didn’t mind the comics. He figured reading was reading. Pleasure was pleasure. Everything else would take care of itself.

Eventually, as I was taught the distinction between what I should read and what I wanted to read — and how little the categories overlapped — that pleasure I’d felt as a kid started to wither under the encroaching shadow of guilt. I lost that sense of unfettered excitement that sent me rocketing to the smokeshop and instead starting lugging recommended reading to the bookstore checkout, all the better to hone my cultural literacy through challenges and struggle and suffering. Throughout school, I was introduced to many difficult books that I ultimately came to love — and many difficult books I was told I should love, and didn’t, and felt ashamed. (I also felt a jolt of excitement every time a genuinely fun book showed up on an academy-approved syllabus. A whole course on Raymond Chandler! My native enjoyment had been suddenly stamped with an official seal of approval.)

This was my lot, and I accepted it. And sure, these struggles would occasionally produce pleasure, like a kind of industrial by-product. But self-improvement — so-called cultural literacy — was always the goal, not pleasure, and guilt was the resultant burden.

Until now. This year, I’m making a simple resolution, much like my friend’s. I encourage you also to consider it. I won’t go so far as to advocate critical anarchy or suggest that we all stop debating why some cultural endeavors succeed while others fall short. (For starters, that’s way too fun.) But I have decided this, as a start: I’m going to banish the word “should” from my cultural vocabulary.

As in: I really should read that new prizewinning novel. Or: You should go see “Her.” Or: I’ve never finished “Moby-Dick,” but I really should.

This doesn’t mean stepping back from the scrum of critical debate: If anything, I think it means re-entering it with renewed energy. Once the old labels are discarded, you’re forced to really advocate for what you love — whether it’s a Korean revenge film or the novels of Jane Austen. And if you love one and I love the other, I acknowledge our affections are equally valid. I can, I hope, lucidly explain to you why I’m not a fan of, say, “Her” without resorting to denigrating you for the fact that you are.

And I’ll pursue all cultural pleasures, and regard them equally. And if this is the year I finally finish “Moby-Dick” (and I plan to!), it will be because I’m enjoying it, not because I want to be the kind of person who has read “Moby-Dick,” and in any case there won’t be any should about it. And if I squeeze in a Charlie Huston novel about a vampire private detective roaming about in New York City, I won’t feel guilty about it or regret it for a second. If that offends you, or seems to portend the crumbling of something, I suggest you avert your eyes. It’s easy enough for you to avoid those things and pursue your own cultural pleasures. You’ve got your own boat, too. Now go float it.

Adam Sternbergh is the magazine’s culture editor and the author of the novel “Shovel Ready.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 46 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘All of the Pleasure. None of the Guilt.’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe